Top-5 concrete companies we love

The construction industry is known as quite an inefficient one. The perfect opportunity for start-ups to bring some innovation to this traditional industry. Here we share our top-5 companies that are impacting the construction industry with innovative concrete.

If you like machine learning, you will love this: self healing-concrete from a spin-off from TU Delft produces self-healing concrete. The technology is based on micro-organisms that produce limestone when they come in contact with water and oxygen. As a result cracks up to 0.8mm in concrete structures can be repaired autonomously.

The Canadian company Carboncure retrofits concrete plants with a technology that recycles waste carbon dioxide from other final emitters. They promise ino impact on the concrete production and the usage of cement can be reduced by 5-8% while achieving superior material performance characteristics helping the construction industry to get a greener image.

Nanogence, an EPFL spin-off based in Switzerland, has developed a lone additive that replaces the various additives currently used to obtain the ideal concrete, mortar or cement structure to enable the right hardness, drying time or uniformity . The additive is inorganic, which eliminates the porosity problem and leads to a prolonged lifetime of concrete. Next to that it improves the hardness of the concrete, making it possible to build thinner walls. The next step is to control the thermal insulation capabilities of concrete with their additive.

London based company, Converge, is building wireless and cloud-based technologies to help construction companies plan projects more efficiently. Their sensors can be embedded into concrete slabs, so construction companies can measure the temperature and hardness of concrete in real-time and can easily optimize the mix design.

Solidia Concrete™ cures with CO2 instead of water. By transforming CO2 into a usable element in the production process of concrete, Solidia reduces the carbon footprint of concrete up to 70% and water consumption 60-80%. The US based company already raised funding from corporates like BASF and BP.